In Robots Podcast #148, Per Sjöborg speaks with Jan Westerhues, Investment Partner with Robert Bosch Venture Capital in Frankfurt, Germany, where he is responsible for robotic investments. Robert Bosch began as an automotive parts firm, but has branched out into other businesses and now has an R&D staff of 15,000 persons. The company's venture capital operation is not an angel investor, and only ever takes a minority position in the companies in which it invests, but, when approached by a company that has already completed the initial phases of identifying a market and defining a product, and has a prototype and a business plan, Westerhues will locate someone within Bosch's R&D staff with the competence to evaluate the prototype, whether it holds the potential to deliver what the company claims for it, and to ‘talk tech’ with the company's own designers and engineers. The ideal situation for Bosch is that in which their own industrial strength can be brought to bear, perhaps supplying parts for the products of the companies in which they invest, but this is not a requirement.

(I listened to this episode five or six times in preparation for this post, and suggest that anyone interested in venture capital funding do likewise.)

In Robots Podcast #147, Per Sjöborg speaks with Giulio Sandini, director of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences (RBCS) at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), about how, having begun his career as a bioengineer working on how the brain controls the muscles which aim and focus the eye, he eventually came to work in robotics, about why interdisciplinary work is important to robotics, and about how diverse teams of engineers, biologists, psychologists, mathematicians, physicists, and medical doctors can learn from each other. Sandini illustrates the point using examples of successful interdisciplinary efforts at IIT, including the iCub and COMAN humanoid platforms, the HyQ quadruped, and their work in rehabilitation robotics.

In this episode, AJung Moon talks with Julie Carpenter, who recently received her doctorate in Educational Psychology from the University of Washington, having written her dissertation on the interaction between military Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) personnel and the robots they use in investigating suspicious objects and rendering explosives harmless – primarily PackBots from iRobot and TALONS from QinetiQ. More generally, Julie is interested in emotional attachment issues in human-robot interaction, and how it affects user decision-making in collaborative, sometimes stressful, situations.

David Dorhout is a graduate of Iowa State University. He has always been interested in robotics and 14 years of experience in agriculture and the biotech industry. He is the founder of Dorhout R&D LLC which is a research and development business designing and building novel robotic systems and interactive consumer electronic devices. In this episode, Ron Vanderkley speaks with David about his robots that include Prospero the robot farmer and Aquarius the greenhouse watering robot. This episode of Robots Podcast is part of Robohub's focus series on agricultural robotics.

You may recall our story in March of this year that described the Pars rescue robot concept developed by RTS Lab in Tehran, Iran. They presented a design for a flying robot that could quickly locate drowning victims in the ocean and launch life preserver floats to them. In less than a year, RTS Lab has gone from conceptual artwork to a working prototype of their robot. From their test report:

The robot’s tests have been taken from 11th to 15th August 2013 at the Caspian Sea. Thirteen tests were taken in a 4 day period and the following aspects were analyzed: Life vest releasing system performance, flight stability, search and rescue performance at day and night, Simplicity of robot’s control, comparing performance with traditional rescue methods, analyzing the deficiencies of robots design. Pars can fly ten minutes in this design and its maximum speed is 10 m/s, thus it can be used in missions with a 4.5 kilometer radius range. Tests were completely successful and all of the expected goals were achieved. Based on the test results and considering the general rescue methods new ideas for developing Pars were achieved that will be revealed after careful scrutiny.

RTS Labs hopes to create further, improved prototypes and eventually commercialize the life-saving robot. And, of course we have lots of cool photos of the robot in action during it's test flight over the Caspian Sea!

Two roboticists in Switzerland have designed and built a new bipedal robot called Jinn. It includes 3D printed parts and can be controlled using open source software running on an Android based mobile phone. Roger Seeberger writes:

"My partner, Michael Roggli, and me developed an biped smartphone controlled (without extra controller like Arduino) robot. The robot, we call it Jinn, is 1m tall and has 24 servos. We will an open source API, Android development, and diffrent Apps. The idea is, customers could order assembled robots but also plans, parts etc."

Seeberger Robotics is the name of their company and they're also developing a small quadraped. Read on for video of both robots in action.